Why your college major doesn't always matter

September 23, 2017

Shortly before he died in 2011, Steve Jobs famously told President Obama that Apple would have located 200,000 iPhone manufacturing jobs in the United States, rather than China, if he could have found 8,700 qualified industrial engineers in the U.S. This exchange and others like it led to a widespread belief that American technology education was in crisis and that the U.S. was hemorrhaging jobs because our students couldn’t or wouldn’t do the hard math.

That claim was nonsense, says Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

To demonstrate that Apple would not have brought those jobs stateside, Salzman calculated the average wages of electronics production line workers in the U.S. at $42,000 compared to the average in China of $4,800. If Apple had relocated all those jobs to the U.S., he concluded, the company would have lost $26 billion a year in profits, slightly more than it earned in 2011 when the comment was made.

If Salzman is right, then even if qualified engineers had been standing on Palo Alto street corners holding “will work for food signs,” Apple would not and could not have made that shift.

Deseret News, September 23, 2017

Recent Posts

U. expert reacts to proposed overhaul of New Jersey public records law

On March 14, New Jersey lawmakers temporarily halted their plans to limit the scope of the Open Public Records Act (OPRA), which compels local governments to release public records upon request, according to the Associated Press. After a committee session advancing...

EJB Talks with Professors Joel Cantor and Kathe Newman

Our EJB Talks podcast this week features ⁠Joel Cantor⁠⁠, Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Director of the ⁠Rutgers Center for State Health Policy⁠ and ⁠Kathe Newman⁠, Professor and Director of the ⁠Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement⁠. They are...

Video: Will We See an End to NJ’s Party Line?

David Cruz talks with Julia Sass Rubin (Bloustein School, Rutgers) about Rep. Andy Kim's party line lawsuit, being an expert witness in the case & history impact of the line.Reporters Colleen O’Dea (NJ Spotlight News), P. Kenneth Burns (WHYY) & Sean Sullivan...

NJSPL – New Jersey’s 2025 Tax Revenue Projections

How New Jersey’s 2025 Tax Revenue Projections Might Affect the Budget Surplus Is the Budget Surplus Safe? Governor Murphy’s recently released FY 2025 budget proposal calls for total appropriations of $55.9 billion, up $1.5 billion (2.7%) from the original FY 2024...

Dean Shapiro: A hidden way politics shapes regulation

Regulations issued by executive branch agencies often get criticized by regulatory opponents as being made by “unelected bureaucrats,” divorced from political pressures and the messiness of democracy. Partly because of that sentiment, the Supreme Court appears poised...

Upcoming Events

Event Series CAREERS

Career Virtual Drop-ins

Virtual

Bloustein Career Development Specialists Cheryl Egan and Andrea Garrido will be in a Zoom Room on Monday's beginning January 22, 2024 (excluding holidays and spring break) to answer questions, provide […]